Thomas Carlyle
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Today is the 228th anniversary of the birth of Thomas Carlyle (04 December 1795–05 February 1881), who was born in Scotland on this date in 1795.
Thomas Carlyle is not going to win many friends or influence many people in the twenty-first century, but he was a figure to reckon with in the nineteenth century. There is a story about Carlyle that reveals something about the man: Carlyle had lent his manuscript of The French Revolution to John Stuart Mill, and Mill’s housecleaner mistook the manuscript for trash and burned the whole thing. Carlyle did not despair (as did Bishop Berkeley when his manuscript of the sequel to A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge was lost), but said to Mill that it would be good for him to re-write the whole thing, which he did. There are few men who could respond with such goodwill to such a loss.
Among the most famous quotes from Carlyle is claim of, “the three great elements of modern civilization, Gun powder, Printing, and the Protestant religion.” This is from his 1827 essay, “The State of German Literature.” Here is the full paragraph:
“Above a century ago, the Pere Bouhours propounded to himself the pregnant question: Si un Allemand pent avoir de Vesprit? Had the Pere Bouhours bethought him of what country Kepler and Leibnitz were, or who it was that gave to mankind the three great elements of modern civilisation, Gun-powder, Printing and the Protestant Religion, it might have thrown light on his inquiry. Had he known the Nibelungen Lied, and where Reinecke Fuchs, and Faust, and the Ship of Fools, and four-fifths of all the popular mythology, humour and romance to be found in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, took its rise; had he read a page or two of Ulrich Hutten, Opitz, Paul Flemming, Logau, or even Lohenstein and Hoffmannswaldau, all of whom had already lived and written in his day; had the Pere Bouhours taken this trouble, — who knows but he might have found, with whatever amazement, that a German could actually have a little esprit, or perhaps even something better?”
My personal favorite quote from Carlyle, which may or may not be a quote, as no one seems to have been able to find it, is the remark attributed to Carlyle by Carl Sagan as a response to looking up into the stars in the night sky: “A sad spectacle. If they be inhabited, what a scope for misery and folly. It they be not inhabited, what a waste of space.” If Carlyle said this, or anything like it, it is certainly one of the most curmudgeonly quotes in history. We recall that Kant said, “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and the more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above and the moral law within.” How a man reacts to the splendor of the night sky says a great deal about his character, and indeed about his attitude to nature. Kant’s Enlightenment reflection on the stars is something we call recognize, but Carlyle’s attributed quote, while readily understandable, strikes us as unexpected.
In these stories and quotes from Carlyle we can glimpse something of the man and his mind. His perspective was largely naturalistic, somewhat pessimistic, a great industry for work (while his histories are little read today, they are voluminous), with a firm grasp of the big picture, and himself perhaps the embodiment of the saying that one need not hope in order to do one’s work — anyone whose unflagging industry involves rewriting an entire book lost to unfortunate circumstances is prepared to work regardless of the calamities of life.
The book that comes up time and again when Carlyle is mentioned is his On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841), which many take to be Carlyle’s definitive statement of his conception of history. Wilhelm Windelband framed Carlyle’s interest in heroes in a distinctive way that places Carlyle in a different light than that to which we are accustomed, placing him in a lineage that includes John Stuart Mill, Comte, and Henry Thomas Buckle:
“Here the proper sense of the antithesis is disclosed: on the one hand the life of the masses with the changes taking place conformably to general law — on the other hand the independent value of that which presents itself but once, and is determined within itself. In this respect the essence of the historical view of the world has been by no one so deeply apprehended, and so forcibly and warmly presented, as by Carlyle, who worked himself free from the philosophy of enlightenment by the assistance of the German idealism, and laboured unweariedly for the recognition of the archetypal and creative personalities of history — for the comprehension and veneration of ‘heroes’.” (A History of Philosophy: with especial Reference to the Formation and Development of its Problems and Conceptions, p. 654)
What Windelband is saying there is that Carlyle’s approach to heroism captures the idiographic dimension of history, while the nomothetic dimension of history is captured by general laws that hold good for the masses but not for the exceptional individual. We can expand Carlyle’s conception of the hero in history by applying the concept of heroism beyond individuals, perhaps to institutions, for example. In my sketch of the work of Ferdinand Gregorovius I noted that in Gregorovius we can see the urban parallel to the great man theory of history: the great city theory of history: Universal History, the history of what humanity has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Cities which have evolved here. I had adapted this from Carlyle, mutatis mutandis, where the original appears in the first paragraph of the first lecture of his On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History:
“We have undertaken to discourse here for a little on Great Men, their manner of appearance in our world’s business, how they have shaped themselves in the world’s history, what ideas men formed of them, what work they did; — on Heroes, namely, and on their reception and performance; what I call Hero-worship and the Heroic in human affairs. Too evidently this is a large topic; deserving quite other treatment than we can expect to give it at present. A large topic; indeed, an illimitable one; wide as Universal History itself. For, as I take it, Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here. They were the leaders of men, these great ones; the modellers, patterns, and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do or to attain; all things that we see standing accomplished in the world are properly the outer material result, the practical realization and embodiment, of Thoughts that dwelt in the Great Men sent into the world: the soul of the whole world’s history, it may justly be considered, were the history of these. Too clearly it is a topic we shall do no justice to in this place!”
We could also extend this treatment of history to singular ideas, which have often shaped great men and great institutions, though all of this takes place against a background of the regularly recurring incidents of life that can be described nomothetically — often must be described nomothetically, as most of the record of the regular business of life has been lost. We excavate this record with archaeological finds, but the books that describe social history only began to appear in historically recent times; of most of history, we are innocent of any record, save the archaeological record, of the non-heroic in history.
So is it the heroic and the idiographic that is the substance of history, or the non-heroic and nomothetic that is the substance of history? Either claim could be defended, and it would be a worthwhile exercise to produce a rigorous argument on both sides of the question, since each position highlights a different aspect of history. I interpret Henri Pirenne’s conception of history to focus on that aspect that is the norm in human affairs, we Pirenne described:
“All historical construction — which amounts to saying all historical narrative — rests upon a postulate: that of the eternal identity of human nature. One cannot comprehend men’s actions at all unless one assumes in the beginning that their physical and moral beings have been at all periods what they are today. Past societies would remain unintelligible to us if the natural needs which they experienced and the psychical forces which stimulated them were qualitatively different from ours. How are the innumerable differences that humanity presents in time and space to be explained if one does not consider them as changing nuances of a reality which is in its essence always and everywhere the same?”
What Pirenne decribes in this passage from “What are historians trying to do?” is all about the bulk of human life, which is neither exceptional nor heroic, but Pirenne does recognize the innumerable differences that humanity presents in space and time, and these innumerable differences perhaps describe a continuum that varies but little for the most part, but occasionally, for the exceptional individual or event, sharply diverges from the norm — but then returns again. We may contrast this conception of history to Hugh Trevor-Roper’s formulation of history as purposive movement:
“…history, I believe, is essentially a form of movement, and purposive movement too. It is not a mere phantasmagoria of changing shapes and costumes, of battles and conquests, dynasties and usurpations, social forms and social disintegration. If all history is equal, as some now believe, there is no reason why we should study one section of it rather than another; for certainly we cannot study it all. Then indeed we may neglect our own history and amuse ourselves with the unrewarding gyrations of barbarous tribes in picturesque but irrelevant corners of the globe: tribes whose chief function in history, in my opinion, is to show to the present an image of the past from which, by history, it has escaped; or shall I seek to avoid the indignation of the medievalists by saying, from which it has changed?” (The Rise of Christian Europe, page 9)
Purposive movement in history requires a catalyst, and a great man, or a great institution, or a great city, or a great idea can be the catalyst that provides the directionality for purposive movement. And just as we can observe in relation to Pirenne that, even we history departs from the norm in the person of the hero, it nevertheless returns to the norm, in relation to Trevor-Roper and purposive movement we can observe that the result of purposive movement in history is to shift even the bulk or ordinary life toward to new modus vivendi, so that it is not precisely the same norm to which we return following a singular and transformative moment in history, but to some “new normal” that has been conditioned by the new presence in history.
I wrote above that Carlyle’s conception of history is naturalistic, and for me one of the most interesting aspects of Carlyle’s implicit naturalism is to be found in his 1830 essay “On History,” in which he presents a comprehensive vision of history as the unification of the present with the whole future and the whole past:
“Clio was figured by the ancients as the eldest daughter of Memory, and chief of the Muses; which dignity, whether we regard the essential qualities of her art, or its practice and acceptance among men, we shall still find to have been fitly bestowed. History, as it lies at the root of all science, is also the first distinct product of man’s spiritual nature; his earliest expression of what can be called Thought. It is a looking both before and after; as, indeed, the coming Time already waits, unseen, yet definitely shaped, predetermined and inevitable, in the Time come; and only by the combination of both is the meaning of either completed. The Sibylline Books, though old, are not the oldest. Some nations have prophecy, some have not: but of ‘ all mankind, there is no tribe so rude that it has not attempted History, though several have not arithmetic enough to count Five. History has been written with quipo-threads, with feather-pictures, with wampum-belts; still oftener with earth-mounds and monumental stone-heaps, whether as pyramid or cairn; for the Celt and the Copt, the Red man as well as the White, lives between two eternities, and warring against Oblivion, he would fain unite himself in clear conscious relation, as in dim unconscious relation he is already united, with the whole Future, and the whole Past.”
Here Carlyle recognizes history as the root of all science (he might also have mentioned mathematics, as both history and mathematics trace to classical antiquity) but also as embodying human spiritual aspirations. It may be that this mixture of nascent scientific knowledge and spiritual aspiration has been, in part, responsible for history not having yet achieved a fully scientific form: it still has too much of human aspiration in it to be a value-free scientific inquiry, as would be required by a rigorous naturalism. And we have countless examples of how this spiritual aspiration has been perverted and betrayed, making history serve ignoble ends, but the same can be said of science. We haven’t given up on science, despite its failings, and perhaps we shouldn’t give up on history as a distinctive admixture of knowledge and aspiration, despite its equal failings.
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